Luna 3 was the Soviet spacecraft that photographed the Moon’s far side for the first time in 1959.
Launched on 4 October 1959, Luna 3 flew around the Moon and used a camera system to capture images of the hemisphere that cannot be seen directly from Earth. It transmitted the photographs back by radio, making the mission a major achievement in early planetary exploration.
The far side is sometimes incorrectly called the “dark side,” but it receives sunlight just like the near side. It is permanently hidden from Earth because the Moon rotates once on its axis in the same time it takes to orbit Earth.
Luna 3’s images were relatively low-resolution, yet they revealed that the far side had far fewer large dark maria than the familiar near side. Later missions produced much sharper maps and images.